Best Nintendo Switch Emulator for Mac

If you’re a Mac user who’s looking for a Nintendo Switch emulator to download, you’ve found the right article! Getting setup isn’t too difficult and wont take long. You’ll be playing your favorite Switch titles like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Metroid Dread, and Zelda Breath of the Wild in no time.

We recently wrote an article on the best Nintendo Switch emulators for Android, but the potential for Apple Silicon Macs is essentially unparalleled in the current market of home computers and devices. These machines could in theory enable emulation closer to that of a native Switch port than most Windows based gaming PCs or Android devices due to the ridiculously powerful ARM synergy they share with the Nintendo Switch console.

Thankfully a very talented team saw the potential and worked extremely hard to release a Nintendo Switch emulator for Mac! We’ll be getting you all setup and ready to play some Switch games on the best Nintendo Switch emulator available for Mac computers.

Let’s get started!

What Is The Best Nintendo Switch Emulator Mac?

Nintendo Switch Ryujinx Emulator

• Price: Free
• Platform: MacOS version available
• Official website
• Discord
• Twitter

What Is The Ryujinx Emulator?

The Ryujinx emulator is one of the more popular Nintendo Switch emulators available. Thankfully the developers have released a version for MacOS as previously it only targeted Windows and Linux devices. It runs solid and has a pretty decent user friendly interface. It is compatible with most Mac computers and is the only Imac and Macbook Switch emulator currently available.

Back in March of 2022, the Ryujinx team put out a post on their blog about porting Ryujinx so that it was supported on MacOS and Apple Silicon devices (this includes older Intel Macs as well). There were many roadblocks during development, but the team was able to successfully pull it off.

They even released a Youtube video debuting the Mac port, showing it running Pokemon Scarlet and Violet on Mac computers.

Considering the MacOS version of the Ryujinx emulator released not too long ago, this seems to still be just the beginning. It’s an exciting time to be a gamer with a Mac!

The Ryujinx team behind the open source emulator push out consistent builds and updates to the other Ryujinx users that you can install from the Ryujinx website.

The website states that it’s an open source experimental Nintendo switch emulator and was originally written from scratch by a single developer back in 2017. Since then, Ryujinx has grown and now has multiple different contributors who work on it regularly ensuring that everyone who uses it is able to continue playing games.

Ryujinx Games Compatability

Speaking of playing games, Ryujinx has a game compatibility list available on their Github breaking down every tested game’s status. Over 4,050 different Nintendo Switch games have been tested and of those, 3,400 are currently considered playable and have decent performance.

Ryujinx Settings

By default, Ryujinx uses optimal settings, so depending on your setup you may need to tinker a bit with the settings to get the performance you desire. You can mess with the graphics settings (resolution, antialiasing, scaling filters, anisotropic filtering, etc) to try and get the best video display you can.

Features

The Mac release also includes LDN functionalitywhich means you can play Switch games with other Ryujinx and CFW Switch users via their hosted servers, over a LAN setup, or ldn_mitm. You can read more about the features of LDN3 in this blog post here.

How To Install Ryujinx Emulator For Mac

The following guide will assume that you have already hacked your Nintendo Switch and dumped your Nintendo Switch keys (prod.keys) and firmware files. This guide illustrates using a properly dumped recent game cartridge as an untrimmed XCI file to install a firmware directly to Ryujinx. It is also possible to install firmware from a folder or ZIP file. You may also follow this firmware dumping guide.

If you haven’t already downloaded Ryujinx, you can download the latest Mac OS build of the emulator from here.

Ryujinx automatically checks for updates when it first starts up. You can disable the auto-update feature from the emulator’s Options > Settings. You may also check for updates manually by navigating to Help > Check for Updates.

This installation guide will be split into two separate sections. One section will be specifically for MacOS 12 Monterey and the other section will be for MacOS 13 Ventura and up.

Install Ryujinx for MacOS 13 Ventura

• First extract the downloaded zip package from the download page somewhere easy to find on your computer like your Desktop. The Desktop is a great choice because it’s simple and easy to locate, but also because it’s not protected and won’t cause any installation issues.
• If you try to run the Ryujinx executable file you’ll see the following because the build of the emulator is not yet officially signed.

• You’ll now need to head to your Mac’s Settings and then to Privacy & Security.

• Scroll down to where you see the Allow applications downloaded from options and find a box that says “Ryujinx” was blocked from use because it is not from an identified developer. Select Open Anyway. A pop-up will ask you to confirm this choice.

You’ll only need to do this step once. In the future, it will automatically keep these authorization settings.

Install Ryujinx Emulator for Mac 12 Monterey

• The process is very similar to the one above for MacOS 13 Ventura, the only real difference is that your settings window looks a tad different.
• First attempt to boot Ryujinx and then navigate to your Mac’s Security & Privacy.

• Now go ahead and select the Open Anyway option near the bottom of the page and you’ll then just need to confirm the choice.

Just like that, you should now have the Ryujinx emulator for Mac all installed and setup! Remember to refer to the compatibility list to see the status for your Switch games and what playable state they are in. This will give you an idea on expected performance.

If you’re also the owner of a PC, be sure to check out our guide on the best Nintendo Switch emulators for PC.